On The Topic Of Retrospectives...

Evolutional's recent post about digging through some old code inspired me to take a look at some of my own. I had recently found a copy of the working development folder of my old game, Golem, on a hard drive in a box, and while I've peeked into it out of morbid curiosity, I haven't felt the inclination to dig very deep until now.

Golem was an isometric ARPG heavily inspired by Diablo and, later, Diablo 2. I had grown up playing the original Atari console and, later, the original Nintendo and the Super Nintendo. I didn't get to have a whole lot of time playing PC games. My first PC RPG was Wizardry 4, and holy shit was that a mind-bender. I played JRPGs on the Nintendo, mostly: Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, etc... Loved Secret of Mana, loved the Zelda games, loved Illusion of Gaia. But playing Diablo was like an awakening. On PC, I had mostly played Nethack up to that point: turn-based dungeon delving rendered in awkward ASCII graphics. But Diablo... well, Diablo was kinda like Nethack (not nearly so deep, obviously) but it looked good. To my young eye, the isometric graphics of Diablo were stunning. Playing Diablo literally altered the course of my life, in ways that I only really now understand. While I had dabbled in game development since the early days of DOS and the advent of 256 color graphics in ModeX, it wasn't until I played Diablo that I really had in mind a vision of what I wanted to do and make.

I started work on Golem some time around 1998. Some of it was just scribblings in notebooks made during lunch break at work, some of it was assembly-language tile drawing routines I wrote later, some of it was C code written for the old Borland Turbo C++ compiler. Over the years, it evolved away from assembly and into OpenGL as I learned new technologies. Many of the first posts I made here on gamedev.net were in regards to this game. In a way, I've been working on this game (in some form or another) ever since. I've certainly spent a lot of time on isometric game prototype development, at any rate, even if little of that original code is still in use. But during the summer of 2004 is when Golem in its final (sadly, uncomplete) form took shape. I was between jobs, having returned (briefly) from Arizona to Wyoming. I had not yet met my wife, bought a house, had kids, or any of that. Everything I owned, I could fit in the back of my old Toyota 4x4. I slept on a cot in my dad's basement. By day, I hiked the juniper and cedar covered hills just outside of town, and by night I hunched over my keyboard, listening to Soundgarden on repeat and furiously pounding out 69,094 lines of the shittiest code you ever did see.

Evolutional's restropective is a thoughtful look at how a maturing developer revisits his old code with an eye toward understanding how he was then, and understanding how he has improved over the years since that code was written. He starts the whole thing off with a look at the project's structure, and while he has criticisms about how he structured things, I gotta say this: Manta-X was a paragon of order and structure compared to this:

Take a look; drink it in. That's the root level source directory for Golem. Are there source files there? Sure are. Are they mixed in with intermediate build .o files? You betcha. Are there miscellaneous game data scattered all throughout like nuggets of gold? You're damned right there are! In the finest code-spaghetti Inception tradition, there are even archives of the game code directory in the game code directory. At a quick glance, I see bitmap fonts; I see sprite files for various player characters and props; I see tile sets; I see UI graphics. Sure, there's a data folder in there, and sure during later development all game-relevant data was finally sorted and organized into the data/ folder structure (it's actually pretty clean now), but all that old testing and development cruft is still in there, polluting the source tree alongside build artifacts like little nuggets of poo fouling the bed sheets.

Rest assured, I have improved--in this regard, at least.

In the last few hours, I've opened up several source files at random and perused their contents, trying to get back into the mindset of Josh v2004, or VertexNormal as I was known back then. This process can also be summed up as 'what the bloody hell was VertexNormal thinking?'

Elephant in the room here: yes, there are singletons. Hoo boy, are there ever singletons. In the final day, when I have to stand before the judgement bar of God and account for my actions here in this mortal life, the question is gonna be asked, sternly and with great gravity: "Did you ever abuse the singleton pattern?" And since God sees all and I will not be able to lie, squirm or weasel, I'm gonna have to say: "Absolutely, I did. Many, many times." It's not going to be a proud moment. (In this envisioning, God looks a lot how I imagine Washu looks; make of that what you will.)

So, rough idea of how it's organized from a high level. We've got a Map, and a MapBuilder. The map, of course, is the level. The MapBuilder is a utility I wrote to encapsulate (and I use the term encapsulate loosely, and with liberal license) the various things I needed to randomly generate levels. We've got a ScriptContext. We have a MiniMap. We have a GlobalAlloc object allocator. We have an EffectFactory. We have an SDLWrap (a wrapper of all things SDL related, naturally). We have a BuildInterface (whatever that is). We have a ScriptInterface, a PlayerInventory, an ItemFactory, and more. All of them, singletons.

All of them.

Look, I kind of get what VertexNormal was doing here. I get it. Software engineering has never been my strong suit, and to this day I continue to make terrible decisions. And back then, I didn't even know what the term 'dependency injection' meant. But man, you guys. Man.

Some day, someone is gonna write a book on how to kill a project, and under the chapter titled "Dependency Spaghetti Through Singleton Abuse" there will be no text; just a link to the repo of Golem. Every knotty little problem, every little grievance and aggravation that led to me ultimately abandoning Golem, finally and completely, can be traced back to the abuse of singletons. Singletons are everywhere, threading a knotty little web of dependency throughout the entire project. Dive too deeply into the source, and the threads of that web can strangle you.

Now, I'm humorously critical of this project, but the important thing about it is that when I look at this project, I see a kid who was trying his hardest to learn. He was learning about object lifetime management, learning about encapsulation, learning about how to build a game in general. He was making mistakes and working to rectify them, and expanding his knowledge in the process. I don't see any value in doing with this project what evolutional is doing with Manta-X; unlike Manta-X, I don't think there is anything of interest to be had from that here. To refactor this thing would be a large task, and ultimately pointless since there is little here that I haven't accomplished, more efficiently and more effectively, in later prototypes. But I think it IS kind of a valuable exercise to look at it and think about how I would do things differently now, knowing what I know in the present.

Aside from the singleton abuse, there are a few issues.

1) VertexNormal still didn't have a good grasp on object ownership and lifetime. The existence of so many singletons demonstrates this, but so too does the structure of the various object factories and allocators. Knowing who owns what, who is responsible for what, and who is just using what, is a large part of game engineering.

2) VertexNormal made the mistake of using custom binary asset formats for everything, even in early stages of development. That meant that I was constantly fussing about with building tools to pack/unpack assets, even as asset formats were constantly changing and evolving. A lot of time was wasted maintaining and modifying the various sprite packing utilities. I had the idea of saving memory by storing graphics as run-length encoded files, using a custom RLE scheme I had devised. It was a carryover from the earlier days, when the rendering was done in assembly and the graphics were rendered directly from these RLE data chunks. But with the switch to OpenGL, the pipeline was modified to include a step for unpacking these graphics to textures, meaning that the steps of packing and unpacking were made extraneous. Disk space was cheap by that point, so there was just no point to keep fighting the binary packing system as I did. I'm amazed that I implemented as many objects as I did, considering each was a binary packed asset that had to be specially constructed. It is especially ironic that I struggled with the binary asset descriptions, when I had already embedded Lua into the project, and Lua is in itself a fantastic tool for data description. These days, all my assets are described as Lua tables rather than binary blobs, and it's easy enough to compile them to binary format.

3) VertexNormal was still figuring out how to draw isometric games and make them look good. The tile-basedness of Golem is painfully obvious in every screenshot. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I made some bad choices with how I was drawing the levels that made it difficult to mitigate the tile-basedness. These days, I make greater use of shaders and techniques that can eliminate the grid and increase flexibility. I'll probably try to talk more about this later, but it is remarkable to realize exactly how much time and effort I have spent on figuring out how to draw isometric levels.

4) This was VertexNormal's first introduction to Lua. It's where I learned to love the language, even if back then I had absolutely no friggin idea how to properly make Lua and C++ work together, in a way that helps rather than hinders. I had difficulties with passing objects back and forth across the interface, hence the existence of the ScriptContext class which was used to set various 'current' objects for manipulation by script. I still struggle with exact implementations, but I have a much better grasp on things now. In Golem, it is obvious I had troubles knowing whether Lua or C++ should be responsible for a given task. Many things that I would now implement in script were then implemented in C++, and vice versa. This is an ongoing learning process.

There are other issues, but these are the main takeaways from my high-level strafing run.

It was a fun little excursion. It reminded me of who I was, back when I thought I had, just, a whole lot to say. I was full of energy, full of excitement. There were a thousand articles I was going to write, talking about all the things I was learning and figuring out, articles that I just never seemed to get to because I was always off chasing something else. It was fun to revisit that. Much of that excitement has faded, now. I no longer feel like I really have a lot to say, or that anybody really cares what I have to say anyway. That's not fishing for comments or arguments to the contrary or anything, it's just the truth as I see it. While I still enjoy doing this stuff, it's not my main passion or focus anymore, and hasn't really been for quite some time. Every day that passes, the field/hobby/industry pulls further ahead of me. People are doing stuff now that we could only dream of back in the day. And with how my time is split between work, family, writing, woodworking, hiking, hunting and fishing, etc, etc, etc... Game development just doesn't consume nearly as much of my emotional and mental capacity as it once did. It's a melancholy thought.

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Despite your criticisms, I like what I see in your old game screenshots. Yes, the forefront of industry continues to drive forward into new frontiers etc etc, so why do new games like Stardew Valley so successfully remind people that enjoyment can still be found in games that are not as technically or graphically advanced? I don't look forward to Goblinson Crusoe because of its technical nuts and bolts - I look forward to it because it looks like it will be a fun game to play.